POP/ROCK
Corinne Bailey Rae, "Black Rainbows" (Thirty Tigers)
The British singer dynamites her own musical past and embraces a larger historical one on her new album. With her self-titled 2006 debut, Bailey Rae established herself as an agile, airy-voiced pop songwriter; it reached No. 1 in her home country, Britain. Her big hit "Put Your Records On" cheerfully but unmistakably called for celebrating a Black heritage.
Bailey Rae hasn't rushed her albums. Her second one, "The Sea" in 2010, dealt with her grief — at 29 — at the sudden death of her first husband, saxophonist Jason Rae. For her 2016 album, "The Heart Speaks in Whispers," she followed record-company advice to return to polished pop-soul love songs. By then she had married S.J. Brown, who has co-produced "Black Rainbows" with her.
On "Black Rainbows," Bailey Rae boldly jettisons both pop structures and R&B smoothness to consider the scars and triumphs of Black culture. "We long to arc our arm through history," she sings in "A Spell, a Prayer." "To unpick every thread of pain."
The songs on "Black Rainbows" flaunt extremes: noise and delicacy, longing and rage. In some, Bailey Rae reclaims her distant punk-rock past, when she was in a band called Helen. Others summon retro elegance, toy with electronics and move through multiple transformations.
The album has a conceptual framework. Most of its songs are inspired by artifacts Bailey Rae saw at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, a former bank building that now holds a huge repository of African and African-diaspora materials: art, books, magazines, music and what the arts bank calls "negrobilia," everyday objects that perpetuated Black stereotypes.
An ashtray in the shape of a Black child with an open mouth was a touchstone for "Erasure," a pounding, screeching, distorted rocker about the exploitation of enslaved children; Another, more ebullient rock stomp, "New York City Transit Queen" commemorates a cheesecake photograph of Audrey Smaltz, the Black teenager who was named Miss New York Transit in 1954.
